In the food service industry, including restaurants, cafeterias, cafes, pizzerias, and the like it is customary to provide customers with food served on some kind of plate or tray. Typically, such plates or trays are made out of a paper or plastic material that is preferably rigid enough to support the item of food being served. With certain types of foods it would be advantageous to have plates or trays that, in addition to being rigid enough to support the weight of served food, could also be selectively bent by the customer to improve the ease of eating the served food. To some degree, efforts along these lines have been attempted, but the results have been unsatisfactory.
For the purpose of describing the present invention, the food serving apparatus will be shown as a pizza slice plate or tray, however it is to be noted that the utility of the proposed invention is applicable to numerous types of foods each of which, can be served on trays or plates having similar features and functionality.
Conventionally, a slice of pizza is typically served on a plate or tray. The pizza must then be picked up from the plate to be eaten. The handling of such foods can quickly make one's hands greasy and many establishments serving pizza provide a stack of napkins to compensate for this problem. If there is an abundance of cheese, sauce, or other ingredients, the pizza can bend from its own weight and tend to come apart, making the eating process a much messier one than is necessary.
To address such problems several food-serving products have been tried. For example, numerous pizza slice-shaped plates and trays have been used. One approach has provided a type of flat pizza tray which is sized approximately to the length, width and shape of a pizza slice that is meant to be served on the tray. The flat planar tray is made out of a corrugated cardboard having corrugated flutes that run perpendicular to the length of a pizza slice resting on the tray. At various points along the length of the tray, a reduced cross-section, or score, parallel to the flutes, is formed into the tray to allow the customer to bend a tray in segments. Beginning nearest to the tip of the pizza, the customer bends each segment downward and away from the pizza slice as the pizza is being eaten. While the bending aspect of this approach offers a promising feature, the planar-tray approach has several shortcomings. First, several types of pizza are heavy for their size and the weight of such pizza can easily cause the tray to inadvertently collapse along its length which, either spills the pizza from the tray, or causes pizza ingredients to spill off of the pizza slice. To counter the lack of sufficient rigidity, trays can be made thicker, but the added material (e.g. thicker paper, plastic or corrugated material) adds to the cost of the tray. Another problem with the flat tray approach is that the trays are typically so closely sized to a pizza slice being served on them that it is quite easy for the pizza slice to become misaligned on the flat tray and when the tray is set down, for the pizza to contact surfaces, such as public surfaces, that are unsanitary. Such trays can also be set down on furniture, for example in a customer's home, or on a car seat, and the misaligned pizza can contact such surfaces causing unnecessary stains, or messes. Also, the planar pizza slice tray approach does not lend itself to a convenient self-containment of pizza slices, for example to fold into the shape of a box suitable for transporting a pizza slice from a pizzeria to another location.
Alternatively, some food serving trays and plates being offered, have a food-supporting member with upward extending side rails which facilitate the retention of an item of food on the food-supporting member. The design of such trays and plates are effective in keeping one or more food item from sliding off, or from becoming misaligned, however, none of them offer the means to selectively bend the trays or plates, or segments thereof, away from the served food while eating; or to maintain tray or plate rigidity until such time when a bending of the food-serving apparatus is desired. Such plates or trays still require a user to lift the pizza out of the food serving apparatus in order to eat the food. Another similar looking apparatus is comprised of a plurality of materials and requires a user to physically collapse the pizza upon itself, along its length, such that the pizza is fully enclosed within the food serving apparatus and segments of the plate are then selectively torn away from the folded food to expose portions thereof that can be bitten. This approach completely alters the normal appearance of the food and is leaves the user, when the slice of pizza has been consumed, with a plate that has literally been torn to pieces. The numerous plate pieces are quite likely to be coated with pizza sauce and/or other pizza ingredients and each will need to be picked up by the user in order to not pose a litter problem. If the user eats several slices of pizza, then the problems of the remaining plate pieces multiplies. Consequently, there is a need for improved food-serving apparatus that address the shortcomings of the status quo.
The purpose of the present invention is to provide improved food-serving apparatus which eliminate the deficiencies of the methods mentioned above and that offers a number of distinct advantages.
Therefore several objects of the invention are provided, which will:                Provide serving trays or plates having sufficient rigidity to serve and support one or more items of food until a time when a user can selectively bend segment(s) of a food-serving apparatus away from the served food to facilitate the eating of the food and can do in a manner that does not alter the normal appearance of the food.        Provide serving trays or plates having sufficient rigidity to serve and support one or more items of food until a time when a user wishes to selectively separate one or more separable joint which allows a corresponding segment of a food-serving apparatus to be bent away from the served food to facilitate the eating of the food.        Provide food-serving trays or plates offering improved protection from unsanitary public or domestic surfaces when the trays or plates are set down on such surfaces.        Provide economical food serving apparatus preferably made of a single contiguous material having a price comparable to other apparatus designed to serve the same food.        